Leslie Berestein Rojas Immigration and Emerging Communities Reporter

An award-winning journalist with several years’ experience reporting on immigration issues, Berestein Rojas most recently covered immigration on the U.S.-Mexico border for the San Diego Union-Tribune. She has retraced the steps of migrants along desert smuggling trails, investigated immigrant detention contractors, and told the stories of families left behind in Mexico’s migrant-sending towns.

A native of Cuba raised in Los Angeles, Leslie has also written for Time, People, the Orange County Register and the Los Angeles Times. She has reported from Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.

Stories by Leslie Berestein Rojas

The Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act wasn't new when 2010 rolled around. The proposed legislation, which would have granted conditional legal status to undocumented young people who attended college or joined the military, had already been knocking around Congress for almost a decade when it was reintroduced last year.

The record number of deportations carried out in the past two years by immigration officials under the Obama administration has been fueled, in large part, by the use of two controversial federal programs that work in cooperation with local agencies, Secure Communities and 287(g).

Illegal immigrants smuggled into Newport Beach on boat, authorities say - Los Angeles Times Eight to 10 people reportedly came ashore on a small boat yesterday and shed their life jackets and some clothes before scattering.

It was the Obama administration's strategic trade-off on immigration: A stepped-up approach to enforcement which, the President hoped, would help win over Republican lawmakers for bipartisan support of a sweeping overhaul of the nation's immigration system.

El Salvador: 3 migrants abducted in Mexico, 5 flee - The Associated Press El Salvador's foreign ministry reports that nine migrants were kidnapped from a train in Mexico last week; five escaped, one died and three are missing.

Immigration has been one of the biggest topics in the news this year, pretty much as it has been nearly every year during the past decade. This year was of special interest, however, not only in terms of what happened (as in Arizona's partial enactment of its precedent-setting SB 1070), but also because of what didn't happen, as in the recent defeat of the Dream Act.

On the heels of weeks of Christmas shopping in stores filled with far too many perplexing choices, New American Media published a great Q&A this weekend with Columbia University business professor Sheena Iyengar, author of the book "The Art of Choosing.

Citing police abuse, Hispanics leaving Conn. town - The Associated Press Racial profiling allegations began about two years ago in East Haven, a predominantly Italian-American suburb 70 miles northeast of New York City.